In the past few months, I’ve delved into a medley of Joomla moves, upgrades and so forth … and the process has been daunting to say the least. It’s really a matter of patience — and knowing where to find the best information.

First and foremost,  JoomlaPack is THE KEY to preserving and migrating your site in all its glory.  It couldn’t be much simpler:

• Install JoomlaPack to your current Joomla site. Configure and then click Back Up Now.
  When the process is completed, download that backup file to your local drive.

Moving to a new hosting environment was a snap! I set up the MySQL database and installed JoomlaPack Kickstart along with my backup archive (see above); then pointed my browser to mysite.com/kickstart.php — and the install was virtually painless!  And the support was beyond amazing on the JoomlaPack forum!

I had (lazily) hard-coded some links in my content, and had neither time nor patience to clean that all up manually. Re-replacer to the rescue! This is an amazing tool that has already become my #1 favorite Joomla plugin!

In (Part 2) I’ll document the migration of a Joomla 1.0 site to 1.5 with Community Builder – still in progress.